...a photoBook is an autonomous art form, comparable with a piece of sculpture, a play or a film. The photographs lose their own photographic character as things 'in themselves' and become parts, translated into printing ink, of a dramatic event called a book...
- Dutch photography critic Ralph Prins

dinsdag 7 februari 2012

Greetings from Jakarta: Postcards of a Capital 1900-1950 is the most comprehensive visual record of Jakarta ever published covering the first half of the twentieth century which was also the last half century of colonial rule. Four hundred and sixty postcards from the author's own collection are brought together here to reveal a city that has largely vanished and is barely recognizable even to most life-long residents. Three hundred and sixty-two of the postcards have individually researched captions and are linked to period maps which enable the reader to identify the precise location of the each image.

This book is the result of twenty years of collecting and research by Scott Merrillees to try and answer the questions: what did Jakarta look like in the past and how did it evolve into the city it is today? It is a continuation of Scott's first book, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs, which focuses on Jakarta during the second half of the nineteenth century. The aim of both books is to transport the reader back to the Jakarta of an earlier age and bring it back to life for the understanding and enjoyment of modern residents and visitors alike before it is lost forever.

Gualtherus Johannes Kolff moved to the Netherland Indies in 1850 and opened a bookshop at Batavia two years later. Soon after he began publishing various lithographic produts eventually including postcards. These cards included chromolithographic and monochrome images of local views and types. These cards gained a wide audience and Kolff later opened offices in Bandung and in Amsterdam.